Category: technology

My new name for eircom. Last friday (24th Feb 2006) my business had no broadband all day long. It was unannounced, unwarranted and unacceptable. When we tried to complain we couldn’t get through and I was eventually told by someone in another business) that they’d talked to eircom this morning and it would probably take all day to fix the problem. I was then informed that we weren’t alone. Every ire-com ADSL customer in WAterford and Kilkenny was affected. Never mind selling on this company again, it’s time COMREG did their job and unbundled the network from the service or we’ll be singing the same sorry tale for the next 20 years.

Another great reason to use your WiFi phone behind a reliable firewall, at home, in the dark. The list of vulnerabilities on this baby include open and immutable SNMP settings, open telnet and rlogin access. Ouch!
I guess we won’t be administering this one via SNMP. Here’s the lowdown from securiteam
Here’s a quote:

“UTstarcom F1000 VoIP Wifi Phone rlogin (TCP/513) unauthenticated access:
The phone’s rlogin port TCP/513 is listening by default and requires no authentication. An attacker connecting to the phone via telnet/netcat is dropped into a shell without any login. The shell provides an attacker full access to the Vxworks OS, including debugging, direct memory dumping/injection, read/write device, user and network configuration files, enable/disable/restart services, remote reboot.”

Very nice little applet from talkswitch. We’ve used this a few times and it’s quite reliable.

Don’t know if readers have had similiar problems but chances are they don’t use Panda Software’s TruPrevent system to detect unknown threats. The heuristic checks are a great idea but really consumptive of memory and processing from what I can see. My hard drive filled up when I installed a lot of applications and hey, presto, the heuristic scans became slower and my email slowed to a crawl (whether sending or receiving). It wasn’t at all obvious what was going on as the problem just appeared to be an issue with our email server.